Would-be political staffers will find valuable pointers of both the inspirational and cover-your-ass varieties.
A longtime political operative recounts the thrills and spills of electoral politics.
Early on, Smith recounts a phone call in which an adviser to Andrew Cuomo told him to cut out his feeble protestations concerning inappropriate behavior toward female staffers: “Don’t bullshit yourself or us.” It took Smith a few years to find the gumption to tell off senior politicos, but she evolved, even ifshe had a perhaps inappropriate (in the view of the New York tabloids, anyway) relationship with Cuomo’s political nemesis, Eliot Spitzer. The author is clearly not fond of Cuomo (“America’s governor was quickly turning into America’s asshole”), nor Bill De Blasio, who taught her “an important lesson in the hardest way possible: nothing, not even burning ambition, could justify working for a politician with no integrity.” On the positive front, Smith evinces respect for Barack Obama. One memorable anecdote involves the Obama campaign war room going into crisis mode when a Democratic governor questioned Mitt Romney’s religion, a forbidden tactic that, Smith writes, “could backfire and transform the wooden, unlikable Romney into a victim and a sympathetic figure.” High on the list of the bad and ugly is Donald Trump, and Smith, generally a competent but not compelling writer, paints a portrait of former boss Pete Buttigieg as his polar opposite, a good man of deep integrity and intelligence, if also given to “ill-fitting suits.” The author’s character studies of politicians in action seldom go deep, but what counts is that action indeed. Smith offers capable descriptions of how retail politics works as well as all that goes along with it, such as dressing for success and handling the press—as when she threatened a reporter that she’d “shove [his] balls down his throat” if he burned her on an off-the-record comment.
Would-be political staffers will find valuable pointers of both the inspirational and cover-your-ass varieties.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-308439-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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